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littlesparkvt writes "NASA has announced the first destination for the Curiosity Rover. They're sending it to 'Glenelg,' a natural intersection of three kinds of terrain. 'The trek to Glenelg will send the rover 1,300 feet (400 meters) east-southeast of its landing site. One of the three types of terrain intersecting at Glenelg is layered bedrock, which is attractive as the first drilling target. "We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road," Grotzinger said. "Our challenge is there is no GPS on Mars, so we have a roomful of rover-driver engineers providing our turn-by-turn navigation for us." Prior to the rover's trip to Glenelg, the team in charge of Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, is planning to give their mast-mounted, rock-zapping laser and telescope combination a thorough checkout. On Saturday night, Aug. 18, ChemCam is expected to "zap" its first rock in the name of planetary science. It will be the first time such a powerful laser has been used on the surface of another world.'"

I've always wondered with incredulity, who is it that has that much of a hardon for trolling that they spend what must be hours writing this copypasta in the first place? Does anyone ever actually bite? Other than to point out that it's obviously a troll? It's mystifying...

People have been talking about doing Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy in space for decades, so I hope it works well with Chemcam. It has a lot of promise, both to speed up exploration, and in places like asteroids and comets, where it may not be feasible or safe to actually touch the target.

They have picked a boring nearby rock for the first target. There has been a discussion of whether or not Mars rocks have a "desert patina" (or varnish), and, if so, what is its nature, and even if it has a biological component. The Chemcam samples the top layer of the target, so may help to answer that.

One has to keep in mind that this is a first-of-a-kind space instrument. It does not use a simple semiconductor laser diode, but a (really delicately aligned) neodynium-doped crystal laser, which is something noone ever sent to another planet as for now. It had to endure the various vibrations, shocks and thermal variations of the liftoff, space travel and Mars landing in order to still work well enough (i.e. output enough power) to vaporize rocks as intended!

(I have worked on the successor to ChemCam, with the team who designed it)

But it also had to be tested to be survivable in all those environments. So far everything downstream of the laser seems to be in working order (verified passively).

It's very very unlikely that we're going to find any kind of functional ecosystem over there. The best we can hope for is a surviving remnant - a few scraps of past life that still manage to live. Fossil evidence of past life would be second best. Curiosity is fossil hunting, among other things, and that includes chemical traces of long dead single celled life.

If it doesn't find evidence of past life, it'll also be studying the geological history of mars to give us a much better idea of whether to give up on the fossil hunting entirely.

Being sure that mars is dead, and has always been dead, would actually be a good thing. It would mean we have no worries about contaminating the place with human missions. We could be as messy as we like whenver humans finally arrive, safe in the knowledge that we're not destroying irreplaceable unique evidence.

It's very very unlikely that we're going to find any kind of functional ecosystem over there. The best we can hope for is a surviving remnant - a few scraps of past life that still manage to live. Fossil evidence of past life would be second best. Curiosity is fossil hunting, among other things, and that includes chemical traces of long dead single celled life.

If it doesn't find evidence of past life, it'll also be studying the geological history of mars to give us a much better idea of whether to give up on the fossil hunting entirely.

Being sure that mars is dead, and has always been dead, would actually be a good thing. It would mean we have no worries about contaminating the place with human missions. We could be as messy as we like whenver humans finally arrive, safe in the knowledge that we're not destroying irreplaceable unique evidence.

If something is living there, then by definition there's an ecosystem - it may not be a diverse one, but it would be there.

It would also be hugely significant. Mars is probably not the greatest target for finding interesting life in the solar system, but if Martian-evolved life of any type were discovered it would pretty drastically alter at least 1 of the variables of the Drake equation.

If something is living there, then by definition there's an ecosystem - it may not be a diverse one, but it would be there.

It would also be hugely significant. Mars is probably not the greatest target for finding interesting life in the solar system, but if Martian-evolved life of any type were discovered it would pretty drastically alter at least 1 of the variables of the Drake equation.

There is a pretty good reason to think that geological material (potentially harboring microbes) has been exchanged several times over the past few billion years, with the K-T event (that killed off the dinosaurs) being one of those events that sent material back to Mars again and likely seeded at least some sort of life almost everywhere in the Solar System where liquid water can be found.

If fact, a strong hypothesis suggests that life as we know it may have even originated on Mars and then came to the Ear

Some of the same people who drove Spirit and Opportunity are on the Curiosity driving team. Here's Scott Maxwell's (of the 'Mars and Me' blog) Google+ page.
"https://plus.google.com/112648317373638762082/posts#11264831737363876
2082/posts"

It would be better to use observations of Mars's natural satellites, especially Phobos. This has been explored with Phobos's transits of the Sun, which could give you positions to a few 100 meters. However, the real problem is not really that they don't know where the rover is, but that they don't know where objects on Mars are relative to the rover, and orbital and ground imaging suffices for that.